I sent them a reel to reel tape that contained recordings of myself and my young siblings recorded at the end of the 60's, start of the 70's. Keep in mind, there were no smartphones in those days, and the only way you could have captured sound would have been with a tape recorder or 8/16 mm super 8 film. And so I had that irreplaceable recording of us.

I decided to take a big chance and send it to Southtree - they being the more highly rated of them and LegacyBox (essentially the same company, but set up as a flanker brand).

I had read that it would take weeks, and was totally fine with that. But at the month and a half mark with no response, I shot them an email. What I got back was about as bad as it gets. I was informed that when they opened my box, they found "nothing" in it. Actually, what they would have found was an Amazon bubble wrap envelope, folded in half with the 5" reel inside, and put into the box at a diagonal angle. I did that so it wouldn't shift around. When I purchased the service, I was given the additional option of having other memories be digitized, so I chose Kodak slides. At the last minute, I was too nervous that sending all of these memories would be risky. Good thing.

Because I only had that one envelope in the box, the person who opened it must have seen all that empty space and assumed that I had put nothing in it but the Amazon envelope that was meant to be padding. So they just moronically tossed it.

The email response told me that SouthTree didn't want to leave "any stone unturned", so, they encouraged me to "look around your house to make sure you didn't forget to send it." My looking around equals their "leaving no stone unturned". Well, I did look around my house and distinctly remember putting it in the box. What an asinine, patronizing way to "leave no stone unturned".

Numerous emails were exchanged with them saying they continue investigating, the top management would be alerted, etc. Weeks went by with me clinging onto hope, but it wasn't to be. I sent a final email asking for at least a refund, which they gave (big deal, they had done 0 work anyway), and seeing if they could at least reimburse me for my loss. In the legal community, it would be called "Gross negligence" and "Breach of Contract". I wasn't thinking of a huge payday. A thousand or 2 would have been a drop in the bucket for my loss, but instead, not even a return email from the owners.

GTH SouthTree. You truly suck and you clearly hire only the most incompetent people because it's cheaper. You will never know the loss, to me, of that irreplaceable tape, but somewhere in the trash dump in Chattanooga, TN, sits my tape, lost forever. What a terrible loss that I can never ever replace.

Happy to have all my old 8nn's transferred. Turn around time was as stated on the site.

I sent in 10 VHS tapes to get digitalized. I ordered a digital download (this form really comes in handy because if they screw it up at all, you can know it before they send everything back), thumb drive, and DVD for each one. One tape they claimed had "graphic content" (it didn't), another one they claimed was damaged, and the newer tapes I sent in (the smaller VHS tapes) were worse quality than the tapes that were 10+ years older.

One of the "newer" ones they had to completely redo because the sound was muffled the first time. The second time, the sound worked, but the quality was terrible. The tape was from 2004. Also, when I got that tape back, there's a small piece of it that's messed up. My VCR tries to eat the tape now when it hits that piece. It didn't do that before and didn't do it when they redid it.

I ended up going on Amazon and buying some hardware that allowed me to transfer the VHS tapes to my computer. Cost me close to $100 with shipping, but the quality was MUCH better and it was extremely easy. It's called Elgato Video Capture.

If you decide to try Southtree, make sure you ALWAYS check the tapes before you send them off. I checked all mine and knew the tape they claimed was damaged wasn't. I checked it again when I got it back. It worked just fine.

You can get refurbished VCRs online. I used a company called Spencertified.

Also, if you have tapes where you have a home video for the first 10 minutes and the rest is stuff recorded off the tv, be prepared for them to put everything on that tape on whatever you ordered. They have no problem deeming your home videos as "graphic" for the dumbest reasons, but have no issue giving you what is considered "copyright content."

I definitely wouldn't recommend their VHS to digital service. They don't enhanced the videos in any way, so the price really isn't worth it or the risks you take to send it off... especially when you can do it yourself and only transfer the actual home video and not everything else on the tape.

I used them before to put cassette tapes to CDs and had no problems.

I hope this helps someone.

Had an issue was easily resolved fully satisficed definitely with refer a friend and use again

Great experience for our family at a time of our lives during Covid to remind us of a better time!

Performances from as far back as 1989 reincarnated! Thank you, Southtree!

I purchased this service in order to create DVD backups of old family VHS cassettes. From the most basic perspective, this expectation was fulfilled. However the customer service was horrendous and details of my order were so grossly flawed that I will never recommend this company or use it again.

Before placing my order I did a lot of research on similar companies and to find reviews for this company's service. I felt confident that my family videos would be in good hands and I liked the idea that my package and conversion would be tracked online with updates.

When I noticed that my box of 10 VHS cassettes, very carefully packaged and using the printed label received from Southtree, had not yet been received by the company I contacted customer service via email. The reply said that it was normal and probably the result of "the weekend". Assuming a delay of about two days due to "the weekend", I expected it would be received and processed shortly thereafter.

After three weeks went by since my shipping date I again checked the status online, and again saw that the package had not even been received by Southtree. It is worth noting that I was shipping from Ohio to Tennessee, according to the Southtree mailing label.

I contacted customer service and was given a generic copy/paste response about how secure and special their shipping method is - but no response or explanation whatsoever about why it was taking so long, and no apology. Nothing on the Southtree site indicates such a gross delay in shipping *to* their facility, and all the website content assures buyers of a smooth process with updates at every step.

Within a day or so of my third message, now containing a lot of all caps words, I magically received a notice that my package had suddenly been received. (No human reply to my last message, however.) Then the tracking emails began trickling in, informing me of the each step in the process. I awaited the return of my originals and new DVD backups, hopeful that the result would make up for the horrific customer service.

When they arrived, my cassettes were not packaged nearly as carefully as I had sent them out. One of the cassettes was outside of its case, and there was no padding in the package. Then I opened the DVDs and started noticing that one, two, then *all* but two of the 10 DVDs had gross misspellings on the labels. Each of my VHS cassettes had properly spelled labels and all Southtree had to do was copy what was written, but they obviously did not. "Concert" is spelled "Concet". "Spring" is spelled "Sprinmg". And so on. Some letters were added; some were omitted. A simple spellcheck would have caught every single error - now printed on the labels of DVDs which were intended to be "archival" quality.

Next I watched the DVDs to see what the quality of the recordings might be. It's awful. Beyond terrible. There are no indexes, and the formats are different between different DVDs - some have tracks, others are all on one track. The video quality skips and is snowy / pixelated. The sound is distorted or missing altogether. Some DVDs appear to repeat the entire cassette's content a second time, which I suppose might be considered a bonus, but it makes it very difficult to fast forward or rewind to a specific spot. One might assume that these quality issues reflect the quality of the VHS cassettes, but it does not. In the majority of cases, the issues I found on the DVDs are not present on the original VHS cassettes.

This service really was a waste of my time, energy, and money, and was absolutely NOT worth the risk of sending out our family's original videocassettes. I would like to have my VHS cassettes backed up to DVD but I will look for a different company to convert the rest. I absolutely DO NOT recommend this company.

I recently bought some groupons for Southtree. They save about 70% over retail Southtree prices. Their service and shipping was excellent and fast. I had the dvds and original films back in less than 3 weeks. I had about 1200' of 8mm and 120 35mm slides converted to DVD. When I first viewed the DVD I thought Southtree had neglected to properly focus their equipment. BUT, I was viewing it on a 4k 65" Samsung. I was so convinced it was not focused right, I got out my old projector and then played the original 8mm film. Turns out it was focused properly, but you just can't get that much data onto 8mm film. When I was watching on TV it was being enlarge at about 200x. The 35mm slides were pretty good, but I didn't think they were as good as what I can do with my Minolta Dimage IV slide scanner. I was correct. I rescanned 4 of the 35mm slides I sent to them, and my images came out sharper and with better color than what Southtree delivered. But for someone that doesn't have a $600 slide scanner, southtree is a very good value (if using groupon). There are other companies that might produce a slightly better scan, but you will probably pay twice as much. BTW- I had southtree scan the slides because after I had all of my 8mm scanned, I still had value left on the groupon. I will scan the rest of my slides myself. In a nutshell, Southtree is a very good value if you have old films or slides and don't have the equipment or expertise to do it yourself. I have included 2 images. The more yellowish one is a full res closeup from Southtree. The other is a full res from my scanner. Even though southtree scanns at a higher resolution, my scan came out more clear.

I had a great experince with this company. Very fast service

I am very pleased with my DVD's
Excellent work and was hsppy with their time